Birthday Memories: Eureka College, Baseball, and Greek Town, Part One

There are certain birthdays that stay with you—not because of anything dramatic, but because they somehow capture a particular moment in your life before you realized it was already slipping into the past.

My twenty-eighth birthday in May of 1986 became one of those memories.

It was my “golden birthday,” though I probably gave that more importance at the time than it deserved. 

Still, twenty-eight felt significant to me then. I had just finished my first year at Eureka College after taking a somewhat indirect route through life to get there. Unlike many of the students around me, I had already been in the Air Force, worked different jobs, and spent a few years wandering through uncertainty before finally ending up at a small college in central Illinois trying to reinvent myself.

I had decided to stay in Eureka for the summer, working in the cafeteria while catching up on reading and making enough money to survive another school year. A few days before my birthday, my friend Kevin called with a proposition that sounded perfect.

He was going to be spending several days in Chicago with his wife, who worked for a small company attending some kind of business function, and he thought we should celebrate my birthday by taking in a Chicago Cubs game before heading over to Greektown for dinner afterward. Better still, he said he would buy the tickets. All I had to do was get myself to Chicago.

That alone would have been enough to make the weekend memorable. But the day before my birthday turned out to be pretty special too.

Although the school cafeteria was technically closed until June, the food service department still handled catering events during the summer months. On that particular afternoon, another student named Sam Harrod and I were assigned to help with a Rotary Club fundraiser at Lake Bloomington. Sam came from one of the old Eureka families and was supposedly a direct descendant of one of the college’s founders, though I suspect that mattered far more to Eureka than it did to Sam.

As catering jobs went, this one was about as easy as they come.

All we had to do was load up a van with steaks, potato salad, baked beans, plates, utensils, cutlery, and a half-barrel of beer before driving a little over an hour to the lake. Once there, we set everything up near the lodge where the fundraiser was being held. The Rotary Club members planned to handle the grilling themselves, which meant our real work would not begin until everyone had finished eating and drinking.

Until then, there was very little to do except wait around.

Fortunately, the food service director was one of those easygoing men who understood there was no reason to pretend to be busy when there wasn’t anything that needed doing. So that is exactly what we did.

One of the Rotarians who owned a lakefront house had a boat and began taking guests out for short rides around the lake. Since Sam and I were standing around doing absolutely nothing useful, we were invited aboard too. Naturally, we also helped ourselves to some of the beer we had brought for the fundraiser.

That beer tasted like every Midwestern summer I can still remember—cold, slightly bitter, and somehow perfect beneath a warm late-spring sky while sunlight shimmered across the water and somebody somewhere laughed too loudly after their second or third drink. You could smell charcoal grills drifting through the air from nearby cabins along the shoreline while radios faintly played country music and baseball somewhere in the distance.

For a couple of college kids working cafeteria jobs, life felt pretty good.

By the time we returned to the lodge, several of the Rotarians had already started grilling thick steaks over open flames. Once again, there was very little for Sam and me to do except stay out of the way, enjoy a few more beers, and wait our turn to eat.

Eventually we loaded our paper plates with steaks, potato salad, and baked beans and sat down together while the evening sunlight slowly softened outside the lodge windows. Looking back now, I honestly cannot remember what we talked about that evening. Probably baseball, girls, classes, summer jobs, and whatever else seemed important to young men standing at that strange age between uncertainty and possibility.

After everyone finished eating, reality returned. Sam and I cleaned up the tables, packed everything back into the van, and headed toward Eureka after dark. When we got back to campus, the food service director looked at all the leftover food and beer and simply told us to take whatever remained.

Not a bad way to begin a birthday weekend.

While we were washing dishes and putting things away, a couple of classmates stopped by. They knew my birthday was the next day and wanted to take me out for a few drinks.

Now, Eureka was a dry town—or at least officially dry. Alcohol could not legally be sold within the city limits. Still, small Midwestern towns have always possessed a certain talent for quietly bending rules when necessary. There were only two bars in town: the Outpost on the south side and the Chanticleer on the north edge of town. Over time, Eureka’s tiny growth had eventually expanded around both establishments, technically bringing them inside the city limits, but thankfully nobody seemed too eager to challenge the arrangement.

The Chanticleer was our preferred haunt.

Looking back now, it probably was not nearly as glamorous as we imagined at the time. It was essentially a dimly lit supper club with wood paneling, cigarette smoke hanging beneath low lights, and a jukebox that probably alternated between Alabama, Springsteen, John Cougar Mellencamp, and whatever country song happened to fit the mood that night. But in 1986 it felt sophisticated to us.

At twenty-eight, I was older than many of the students around me, though back then I rarely thought much about it. Most of them had moved directly from high school into college while my own road had taken a few detours before arriving in Eureka. But maybe that was part of what made that birthday feel important to me now that I look back on it.

There I was on the edge of twenty-eight, drinking beer with friends in a small Illinois college town after spending the afternoon beside a lake, knowing that the next day I would be heading to Chicago for a Cubs game and dinner in Greektown. Life still felt wonderfully unfinished then. The future seemed wide open in ways that only become visible once you are old enough to understand how quickly those years disappear.

At the time, I probably assumed moments like that would always be waiting somewhere down the road—warm spring nights, old friends gathered around a table at the Chanticleer, cigarette smoke curling beneath dim lights, and long conversations about books, baseball, politics, girls, and whatever else young people believe will matter forever.

Of course, memory knows better now.